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Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Wikiversity/Sample skins for presentations

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Sample skins for presentations

There is often a small screen facing the presenter, and a big screen facing the audience; the presenter's screen may show slide notes and timing information
  • Problem: Currently, if you want to upload a presentation to Wikimedia, you convert it to a PDF and put it on Commons. This format is not easily modifiable, reusable, or accessible. If you want to display Mediawiki pages on a big screen, you can use the F11 key to fullscreen the browser content (try it now; hit F11 again to return). But that leaves the screen cluttered with Mediawiki sidebars, and there are no convenient navigation functions for switching between slides. There are users who create their presentation on Wikiversity and try to create their own presentation skin to display it. The skins are not perfect, due to the lack of CSS knowledge, and thus cannot be used in main namespaces.
  • Who would benefit:
    • Anyone wanting to give a slideshow talk, or reuse wiki content in a talk, or vice-versa. Slideshow skins would provide easier way to use Wikiversity for lectures. Wikiversity users have a particular interest in putting lecture slides online.
    • Everybody interested in the topic of the slideshow talk. Presentations placed on Wikiversity as markup provide more opportunities for collaboration and learning than presentations left in PDF on Wikimedia Commons. Collaborative creation of slideshow content would be much easier.
  • Proposed solution: A Mediawiki implementation of a web-based slideshow, allowing wiki pages to be used as fullscreen presentation slides. A good addition would be a download/export function to get a flat file containing the presentation. Ideally, there should be second screen capability, so that the presenter can also see a countdown timer and a short set of point-form notes per slide. ~Five sample skins in CSS for lectures/presentations, which might be attached to a special namespace, or selected by individual users wanting to use Wikiversity for presentations, would provide choice in styling.
  • More comments: Mediawiki obviously already renders in browsers, so this might be a fairly easy way to provide a really useful functionality. It could also attract users and content to Wikiversity.
    • Example: v:en:User:Juandev/CEE19/Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons is handled by a skin in v:en:User:Juandev/monobook.css
    • The same format could be used to display an academic poster, made with existing Wikiversity tools, on a screen. SVG already does this well, but less wiki-reusably.
    • The W3C has a (flat-file) format and freely-licensed implementation, HTML Slidy, which might be useful. It exports/is XML; PDF export might also be useful, and might overlap with the article-export proposal.
    • I'm not sure whether it would be appropriate to do this with a skin (skin experts, I'd welcome your comments). If a skin with slide-navigation functions would be OK, then we could do the rest with a template taking, as parameters, a list of the wiki pages/sections to be used as slides, and displaying a slide-thumbnail menu with switch-skin links. Any page with that template would then become a slideshow. Perhaps second-screen capability could be done with a popup?
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Juandev (talk) 07:36, 4 November 2019 (UTC) and HLHJ (talk) 23:45, 3 November 2019 (UTC) (merged proposal)[reply]

Discussion

Juandev, if I've understood you correctly, this is similar to the #Wiki-based slideshows/posters proposal. Would a merge be OK? If you want to merge it, please do. HLHJ (talk) 00:59, 8 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I am not sure. Poster proposal is about having one simple skin for all Wikiversity pages, this colls for multiple skins. Maybe you can merge it, but ask for more skins, from which the person willing to present directly a Wikiversity page could change. Like we have more skins in our preferences for hole wiki (Monobook, Vector, chicken). I wonder if this is an extension, it could work pretty well for every wiki project and e.g. Wikipedia presentation would benefit out of it also. Juandev (talk) 10:01, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks to Bawolff for assessing the technical difficulty ("at a glance sounds do-able and an apprppriate difficulty level for community wishlist"). HLHJ (talk) 18:37, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Juandev, MusikAnimal (WMF), I have merged from Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Archive/Wiki-based slideshows/posters as requested. Comments welcome, especially if I have misunderstood you, Juandev. HLHJ (talk) 02:11, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm wondering if multiple separate skins are really needed for styling, or if a bit of supplementary custom CSS would do. Something like Wikipedia:Help:User style and maybe Wikipedia:Help:HTML in wikitext. Swapping background images, heading and text styles would cover pretty much everything a lot of people do to their slides, so several little "slide-styles" could quickly be written, with an easy UI for picking one. Mini slide-styles, modifying a single full slideshow-skin, seems as though it might be easier than multiple full skins. Expert opinion welcome. HLHJ (talk) 02:20, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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